Comment by dsign
5 hours ago
I have a habit of reading obituaries and of getting a small reprieve when the cause of death is not cancer. I have the feeling that, for something that kills one in four people, we should be doing more as a society, and not leave the problem to a small group of people desperately fighting in the shadows. Thank you for your service, Dr. Scoyler.
One of the reasons cancer kills 1 in 4 people because we've eradicated lots of things that killed people before they were old enough to develop cancer. If we ever manage to cure cancer (or some cancers, because it's a taxonomy rather than a thing) then people will die of something else. No doubt we'll then wonder why we never spent enough effort curing whatever that is.
There will always be a reason why people die, and it will never feel like we're doing enough.
"because we've eradicated lots of things that killed people before they were old enough to develop cancer"
The other reason might be, we introduced lots of new cancer inducing compounds.
Also cancer is very complex and a broad term. "Solving" it likely requires solving the human body first, as in understanding every mechanism to the finest details.
Not to subtract from anything you said, but something that could help us, in the aggregate, as a society, is to frame things differently.
Today, most people say "human biology is a thing of wonder" "Humans are built for longevity". And when a terrible ailment strikes, they explain it with "The meaning of life/God/The devil/We must die of something!"
In my mind, we could create a human systems biology profession where students are told during the first day at school "human biology is a mess wrought up by mindless evolution. Your job is to bring it to the exacting standards of perfection that we are able to apply to other things. In the measure we succeed, we will be able to bring dignity to billions of people."
Yes. Modern life is a chemistry experiment. We are also exposed to various forms of radiation on a regular basis.
To add something, glioblastoma multiforme is really weird and our understanding of it is severely limited.
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> There will always be a reason why people die, and it will never feel like we're doing enough.
That's the best of humanity: love for fellow human beings, and a desire to preserve life. And seeing that we live in an inconceivably vast and empty universe, I see nothing wrong with the idea.
Yes, and the other reason is we don’t invest enough.
Calling them all cancer is somewhat part of the problem I think.
It's not one disease, it is lots.